MOVIE REVIEW: Film on Anita Hill could make a better case

Friday

Apr 4, 2014 at 7:00 AM

If you're over 30, you no doubt remember the watershed moment when University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill exposed the dirty little secrets of sexual harassment before an all-white-male Senate Judiciary Committee – and a national TV audience. It was shocking, enlightening and embarrassing.

By Al AlexanderFor The Patriot Ledger

If you’re over 30, you no doubt remember the watershed moment when University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill exposed the dirty little secrets of sexual harassment before an all-white-male Senate Judiciary Committee – and a national TV audience. It was shocking, enlightening and embarrassing, especially for Hill, who underwent nine hours of fierce interrogation by 18 elected nincompoops, including Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy, who not only had Mary Jo Kopechne on his résumé, but also years of alleged sexual harassment famously chronicled by the late Michael Kelly in a 1990 GQ expose. That was one year before Anita Hill became a household name by coming forward to challenge the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. But the pols shockingly did more vetting of her than the man they were about to hand immense authority.

The new documentary “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power” takes a timely look back at those chauvinistic days with Oscar-winning director Freida Mock (“Maya Lin: A Strong Vision”) making no bones about her admiration for Hill, now a professor at Brandeis University in Waltham. It’s a big, wet, slobbery kiss of a movie, in which not a single detractor is heard from over a too-brief 75 minutes. But that doesn’t stop you from being awed by Hill’s perseverance through years of backlash and death threats hurled by bigots. And those are just her fellow Oklahomans. It got so bad for her there that she says she had to flee to Massachusetts to feel safe.

It’s a sad commentary on our society, and a reason more people like Hill don’t come forward to blow the whistle on politically connected superiors. People like Thomas, Hills’ former boss at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where in the mid-1980s, she says, Thomas repeatedly hit on her and bombarded her with talk of pornographic movies, the size of his penis and the placement of pubic hairs on his can of Coke. The most interesting aspect of her story is that there were four other women making similar allegations about Thomas, none of whom were allowed to testify by Biden, the committee’s chairman.

The movie’s first half concentrates on how Biden let Hill’s sexually charged testimony become a circus, with his fellow good-ol’-boy colleagues allowed to attack Hill unchecked for hours on end. Hill said she expected to face a panel of patriots looking to confirm that Thomas was a man of integrity. Instead, she faced a gang of spineless politicians with zero interest in the truth. At one point, Sen. Alan Simpson called Hill’s testimony “crap.” And authors Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, who wrote the definitive book about the hearings, “Strange Justice,” note that Simpson’s fellow GOP senator Orrin Hatch devised Thomas’ racially charged rebuttal, in which the embattled judge said he was a victim of a “high-tech lynching.” That’s not as shocking as watching Biden making Hill squirm by repeatedly asking her to describe in gory detail Thomas’ alleged malfeasance. You expect backward hicks like Alabama’s Howell Heflin to ask stupid questions like “are you a scorned woman … or a martyr?” But not the committee’s chairman. Then there’s Kennedy, whose track record with women was so checkered that he dared not utter a word in Hill’s defense. Reliving these sad moments via a series of fascinating archival clips gets you riled up all over again. As well they should. The Judiciary Committee performed its duties shamefully that second Friday in October 1991 and, in Mock’s eyes, should be held accountable for it.

Perhaps that’s why Mock is so determined to right Hill’s place in history, which she does in the film’s second half, where we see the social-justice advocate out on the speaking circuit, encouraging young girls and women not to be afraid to fight back if they are sexually harassed. Her many fans respond with nothing but adoration for their champion. We also see Hill, the youngest of 13 children, interacting with her family, and meet her charming, devoted boyfriend, Waltham restaurateur Chuck Malone. But what all this stuff has to do with anything remains a mystery. Mock would have been better served spending that time tracking down Biden to ask him why the other four alleged victims were never called to testify. And why didn’t Mock also seek interviews with that quartet of accusers? It’s as if Mock is so busy sanctifying Hill that she forgot to take care of business, proving beyond a doubt that her subject’s accusations were true, not innuendo. That information would make Hill an honest-to-goodness hero, a status she truly deserves.